Author Archives: judith rehak

At the Toyota factory in Georgetown, KY, a worker starts the night shift after leaving her son in the homey surroundings of the company’s 24-hour child care center; a nurse at a downtown Chicago hospital drops off her daughter at its preschool; in Everett, WA, a new $4 million family center is the pride of Boeing.Behind each of these enterprises ...

At the age of 34, Hugh Miller has been chief executive of Delta Financial Corp. for seven years. Officially, that is. In many ways, Miller’s been handling the job since 1985. At that time fresh out of college and selling insurance-he was offered an office at the company by his father, Delta’s founder. “Then it was, ‘could the bookkeeper report ...

Multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and sporting one of his trademark “lion” ties, Henrich Heitmann, chairman and CEO of BMW (US) Holding Corp., epitomizes the global executive. He joined the German luxury carmaker 12 years ago-not in Munich, but Singapore, where he had previously represented Volvo. From there, he covered 19 countries for BMW’s marketing group before returning to Germany, where he rose ...

What’s Charles Schwab, the discount brokerage king, doing on the cover of KeyCorp’s 1996 annual report? For that matter, why was an unshaven Anthony Edwards, star of ER, one of television’s hottest programs, featured on last year’s cover?They both underscore KeyCorp Chairman and CEO Robert Gillespie’s determination to build the nation’s 14th largest commercial bank into a major financial services ...

A typical Saturday afternoon finds Frank O’Connell browsing the greeting cards displays in retail stores and calling one of his merchandisers by cell phone to ask why there are empty slots where the finest Gibson Greetings, Inc. products should be. Since he was named CEO of the Cincinnati-based company last August, it’s been a seven day-a-week job for the high-energy, ...

James Hackett will never make the list of the 10 toughest bosses in America, and that’s definitely how he wants it. His management style as president and CEO of Steelcase, the Grand Rapids, MI, office furniture giant, includes gambits like his weekly e-mail letter to the company’s 20,000 employees. The personally written missive, dubbed “The Wednesday Huddle,” after Hackett’s football-playing ...

When William J. White, chairman and CEO of Bell & Howell, met recently with representatives from his company’s banks about refinancing debt, he was in for a surprise. “The same banks were there, but different people,” he says. “The ones we knew well were in the high-risk, high-yield, leveraged departments.” Why the new faces? “We’d been moved to the good ...

The well-mannered members of the famed Beardstown Ladies’ Investment Club can be a pretty hard-nosed bunch when it comes to choosing their investments. But one company that wins their approval year after year is RPM, the Medina, OH, maker of coatings, sealants, and specialty chemicals. Boring stuff? Perhaps, but oh, so consistent, says Chairman and CEO Thomas Sullivan. In 23 ...

THE BOSS BEHIND BOSSCEOs tend to be a well-dressed lot, but Peter Littmann is more so than most. At a recent meeting in New York, he was the epitome of Eurostyle, clad in an impeccably tailored, double-breasted gray suit, blue-and-white striped shirt, and discretely patterned yellow tie.To be sure, wearing his product is a requisite of his job. He’s chairman ...

Most folks would see a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon between selling a can of soup and a quart of motor oil. Not Herbert M. Baum, chairman and CEO of Quaker State. Baum arrived at the motor oil company in June 1993 after 18 years at Camden, NJ-based Campbell Soup, where he made his mark as a marketing ...